In recent years there have been significant advances in the art of automatic machining. Large, versatile CNC machine tools have become the standard. Such machine tools are conventionally programmed by computer in response to program instructions supplied by design engineers. Such programming is extremely time consuming and expensive.
There has long existed a need for machine tools which can be programmed by a teach in technique to produce a CNC file, which can then be amended or modified as desired. Such machines are not believed to presently exist.
While there do exist gauges for electro-optically measuring a given object and outputting coordinates thereof to a computer for subsequent use in programming machine tools, no such device has been integrated with the machine tool itself.